This article was originally written for the Gust Programmer programming in the TCM Now Playing newsletter in August 2025.
Turner Classic Movies has a friend in lauded filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. In fact, Anderson must have celluloid coursing through his veins. The 11-time Oscar nominee—who has written and directed such contemporary classics as Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012) and Inherent Vice (2014), based on the Thomas Pynchon novel—goes so far as to constantly have TCM on his television.
The 55-year-old Anderson has stated TCM is like “water, food, drink and oxygen” to him. So much so, he believes if it’s on 24/7, the “spirit of TCM” will permeate the house and even his dreams. Since his feature debut nearly 30 years ago with 1996’s Hard Eight, Anderson, who cites Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles and Max Ophüls as his greatest influences, has won the top prizes at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals. He’s directed eight actors in Oscar-nominated performances, most notably Daniel Day-Lewis, who won Best Actor for There Will Be Blood.
Anderson has given back to TCM by becoming one of its greatest champions. Two years ago, Anderson, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese became advisors and consultants to TCM, attending the TCM Classic Film Festival, discussing the importance of film preservation and programming special evenings. Last year, Anderson joined host Ben Mankiewicz for a Two for One presentation of a duo of 1976 films he saw as a child in the San Fernando Valley—Bugsy Malone and The Bad News Bears.
And now the writer/director is returning to TCM on September 26, which also happens to be the opening date of his latest movie, One Battle After Another (2025), for an evening of classic films with Ben Mankiewicz. Just as with his other films, One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has been shrouded in secrecy. But according to IMDb.com, the nearly three-hour film is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland” and revolves around a group of ex-revolutionaries who reunite after 16 years to rescue the daughter of one of their members.
Little wonder then that Anderson has chosen Sidney Lumet’s haunting 1988 drama Running on Empty as the first film of the evening. Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch play former anti-Vietnam War activists whose bombing of a napalm factory led to the blinding of a maintenance worker. They and their two sons have been on the run from authorities since the bombing. But their eldest son (River Phoenix) is sick of constantly living in fear and “desires” a normal life.
Phoenix, who would die five years later at the age of 23, earned a supporting actor Oscar nomination, as did screenwriter Naomi Foner, the mother of Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal. TCM.com noted Running on Empty was a “small, personal production for Lumet—shot with a small cast and crew of only sixty” and is a “quiet film about volcanic revelations.”
Kevin Thomas in his L.A. Times review stated that Lumet, who had been a socially conscious filmmaker since his debut feature, 12 Angry Men (1957), respected the “idealism” that radicalized the couple “during the Vietnam War and appreciates the circumstances that have dictated their fugitive existence while making us wonder how long they can keep their sons within it,” adding the film is a “reminder of the Vietnam War era and its painful legacy, which is driven home with an unexpected force that’s all the more shattering because of its indirectness.”
Anderson grew up in anything but a radical family in the San Fernando Valley, where he sets many of his films, including most recently in the 2021 comedy Licorice Pizza. His father, Ernie Anderson, was the voice of “The Love Boat” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” He also hosted horror films on Shock Theater in Cleveland. His father was one of the first people on his block to own a VCR. Not only did Anderson get an extraordinary education watching movies on the VCR, but he also began to shoot and edit movies when his father gave him a Betamax camera at the age of 12.
Which brings us to Anderson’s second film of the evening, the entertaining action comedy, 1988’s Midnight Run, starring Robert De Niro as a former Chicago cop turned bounty hunter hired to capture a mild-mannered accountant (Charles Grodin) who embezzled millions from a mob boss only to donate that money to charity. But it was Philip Baker Hall’s performance as Sidney, a Las Vegas mobster’s cool-headed consigliere who tries to convince his boss not to murder people, who proved to be an early inspiration to Anderson.
A 2008 Esquire article on Anderson noted that Sidney “possessed curiously formal diction that seems to have hit Anderson in the place where he vibrates to the rhythms of David Mamet. ’’As fate would have it, Anderson ended up being a PA on a PBS production starring Hall. The two bonded, and Hall ended up starring in Anderson’s 1993 short film, Cigarettes & Coffee, as well as Hard Eight, which was based on the short. And yes, Hall plays a character named Sydney. Hall also became one of Anderson’s stock company of actors appearing in three of his films.
Midnight Run is followed by William Friedkin’s kinetic 1971 Oscar-winning thriller The French Connection. Based on the book by Robin Moore, The French Connection revolves around the real-life exploits of Harlem narcotics squad officers Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso while they were investigating a French heroin smuggling organization. Gene Hackman won his first Oscar as Egan, called “Popeye” Doyle in the movie; Roy Scheider plays Grosso, who is renamed Russo in the film. Besides Hackman, The French Connection also received Academy Awards for Best Film, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Editor.
Shot in around 40 days in a documentary style for a mere $1.8 million, the film eschewed sets for real locations. “The French Connection was an independent film,” Friedkin recalled. “Aside from the fact it was financed by Twentieth Century-Fox, we had no contact with the studio." In a 2001 L.A. Times interview, Friedkin said it was near impossible to get anyone interested in making the movie. Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck told him, “‘If you guys can make the film for that, go ahead. But I won’t be here when you finish it.’ He was fired a week before we started shooting. It was a miracle we ever got to complete the film.”
The film’s pulsating, pioneering chase sequence in which Popeye drives at a breakneck speed through the Battery as he follows a French hitman trying to escape on the L-Train wasn’t in the original script. “I felt it needed it,” said Friedkin. “A week before we started shooting the film, the producer and I decided to walk from my apartment toward the Battery. It was 55 blocks. All around us we heard the rumble of the train and the subway beneath our feet. That gave us this idea. Then I had to go find out if it was possible for a car ever to catch a train.”
Anderson returns to the revolutionary theme he explored in Running on Empty with the fourth film in the lineup, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers, which Pauline Kael proclaimed the most stirring revolutionary epic since Battleship Potemkin (1925). The film, which earned Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film, Director and Screenplay, recreates with blood, sweat and tears Algeria’s lengthy and violent struggle for independence from France.
TCM.com notes that it stands out “among political films for its direct impact: it has been studied equally by revolutionary groups and governments throughout the world, including the Pentagon in the lead-up to the Iraq war. A meticulous reconstruction of recent history—the film was shot in Algiers only a few years after the events took place—it provides an unprecedented view inside the operations of an actual insurgent organization.”
The film, which visually recalls such neo-realist Italian films as Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), is more than a political film. “As filmmaking it is tremendously accomplished, and its pseudo-documentary style has influenced many directors seeking to create an aura of authenticity and immediacy when depicting recent historical events,” states TCM.com “The heightened contrast and grain in the black-and-white film stock and the hand-held camerawork are indeed supposed to suggest documentary newsreel footage.”
Anderson’s final film of the night is John Ford’s beloved 1956 Western The Searchers, starring John Wayne as Ethan, a flawed and unapologetic Civil War vet who goes on a multi-year obsessive search for his niece (Natalie Wood), who was kidnapped by Native Americans. George Lucas, Scorsese and Spielberg have discussed extensively how The Searchers inspired their work. Even Jean-Luc Godard weighed in on the film. Screenslate.com recalled the New Wave filmmaker’s 1959 essay for Cahiers du Cinéma, where he compared the ending of The Searchers as “Ulysses being reunited with Telemachus.” Four years later, he chose it as the fourth greatest American sound film after 1932’s Scarface, 1940’s The Great Dictator and 1958’s Vertigo.
At least from the trailers for One Battle After Another, DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson has more than a bit in common with Ethan as both are on an all-consuming search for a kidnapped loved one.
The Searchers is also known for its extraordinary use of the large-screen format VistaVision introduced by Paramount in 1954, which provides higher resolution photography and an image that is 2x the size of a regular 35mm film. Clearly, Anderson was inspired as One Battle After Another was shot in the 71-year-old format.
